All this week we’re exploring the world of Arduino with projects, tutorials, and more. Of course, Arduino is not the only microcontroller out there—not by a long shot. To better understand the changing world of boards and how Arduino fits in, contributing editor Alasdair Allan wrote a great piece for MAKE Vol. 36 that explored the crowded landscape of microcontrollers.

Alasdair writes:

If you’re old enough to remember the wide range of personal computers that sprung up in the early years of that industry — each with a different manufacturer, each based around a different CPU — then the state of the modern microcontroller board market may seem familiar. One looming question is whether, on the heels of this explosion in diversity, we’ll see the rise of a monoculture, as we did in the desktop market. Or whether, perhaps, a more interesting ecosystem will emerge.